Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
At 08:45 PM 12/31/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote: You do know she's been trying the same scheme for several hundred thousand years, right? As an artist, I think she's in a creative decline. Ebola is picturesque and flashy, but not all that scary unless your funeral rites involve lots of contact with the blood of your dearly departed. I think E. is a bit more contagious than you recognize. It just hasn't had the chance to play in dense pops. AIDS is more subtle, rather like syphlus before good antibiotics, but it's not her best work. Yeah but the meatbots do love to spread it, and here you again fail to recognize Her subtlety. Even SARS is Yet Another Coughed Contagion. If I recall correctly, smallpox got 90% of the American Indians who were exposed, and measles killed something like 1/3 of Roman citizens. Smallpox would reduce real estate prices by 1/3 at least, possibly more in cities. An interesting question is what decline (and what rate of decline) west.civ. can tolerate these days. Still, looking at the Roman Empire (aka paleo-cons) disease isn't necessary, though it sure helps. Famine and war are pretty good cards in Her Hands too. Guns, germs, and steel, baby.
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 12:45:51PM -0800, Tim May wrote: those working had to work even harder. A vicious circle, much like the one now facing American industry, where more and more workers are claiming bogus disability and where the insurance costs are driving companies out of the country. One of my cousins is married to a private investigator who does work for insurance companies. Over the Christmas holiday I chatted with him for the first time in some detail about his work. Turns out that many people (he says) take paid disability leave from their company to work at a temporary under-the-table job or take legitimate disability leave and then decide they like not working so decide to make it permanent. He sits outside their houses in a van with tinted windows and takes video and photos of them driving to their temp job, cleaning gutters, going for a jog, and so on -- after they claimed they are no longer to walk. With that evidence in hand, the employer calls them up and tells them to be at work the next day -- or be fired. If I were the employer, I wouldn't even give them that second chance. -Declan
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
At 12:58 PM 1/5/04 -0600, Declan McCullagh wrote: With that evidence in hand, the employer calls them up and tells them to be at work the next day -- or be fired. If I were the employer, I wouldn't even give them that second chance. Motivation might be loss of training or worry over lawsuit? The state of CA was running adverts last year reminding the volk that its a felony to fake disability for worker's comp. My wife's a shrink, she has had occasion to evaluate people for mental distress (for worker's comp) caused by work. Sometimes they piggyback pre-existing problems onto their claims, sometimes people or conditions at work would screw with anyone's head. Sometimes they regard her (the examining shrink) as an adversary, sometimes a friend. I imagine same goes for visceral physicians too -though pain is as easy to fake as anguish. The technical term for faking it is 'malingering'. Some of the questions in standard written exams try to detect this, as well as the opposite, concealment. (There are times when you want to conceal a condition that you are aware of.)
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 01:14:01PM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 01:59:50PM -0500, Sunder wrote: If those are your beliefs, then by all means, set the first example, and go kill yourself. Better yet, sacrifice yourself to your goddess... By doing so, you'll also earn yourself a Darwin Award... unless you've already fathered kids... But from your tone of voice, I'd say you've probably castrated yourself years ago. No, I have offspring. But what makes you think I'm human? The painful banality and stupidity of the junk you're spouting is a good indicator. -- avva
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Negresses
At 08:53 PM 12/31/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: You'd dice and slice an African American population, but then again it's from these inner cities that much of popular American culture has arisen (ie, between pro sports, various forms of music and so on...). Is this supposed to be an argument *for* the AA pop? None of us, even TM, methinks, has anything against anyone for where their ancestors came. Many of us have much against various *cultures*, which are by definition voluntary, unlike albedo. Cultures being chosen sets of values, values being moral, ergo judgeable. Genes being inherited are largely irrelevant to the discussion. Trash is trash, it doesn't matter the color of the bag containing it. And noble metals come in many colors.
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
At 10:18 AM 12/31/03 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: It's not that just some humans are useless eaters, it's that all are, and the Goddess Gaia is clearly hard at work trying to rectify this situation with a variety of new bioweapons, i.e., AIDS, ebola, etc. which will soon, I'm sure, reduce the human population as is most necessary, by half, if not three-quarters, or perhaps just eliminate it all together -- to the wild applause of the rest of the Earth. You do know she's been trying the same scheme for several hundred thousand years, right? As an artist, I think she's in a creative decline. Ebola is picturesque and flashy, but not all that scary unless your funeral rites involve lots of contact with the blood of your dearly departed. AIDS is more subtle, rather like syphlus before good antibiotics, but it's not her best work. Even SARS is Yet Another Coughed Contagion. If I recall correctly, smallpox got 90% of the American Indians who were exposed, and measles killed something like 1/3 of Roman citizens. Bubonic and pneumonic plague swept through European cities and wiped out huge numbers of people, and they're still with us, though mainly places with lousy public health and sanitation. And lets not forget her original innovation for discouraging cities, death-by-crapping-out-all-your-electrolytes. If diseases get us, they won't be Gaia's work, but rather some of her more modern imitators in the bioweapons labs of various countries. Like every great artist, she's spawned a host of followers, mostly not too imaginative, but some of whom may take her ideas and techniques to undreamt-of levels. .. Harmon Seaver --John (*cough, cough*) Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks
Tim May wrote (and fairly cogently, I might add)... If a person thought he was not being paid enough, it was his option to go elsewhere, to start his own business, etc. If a business wanted to raise or lower prices, their option. Customers were free to purchase or not. This is an idealization, of course, and to the extent that it was true I agree with some of the main conclusions here. Another idealization is that, once in a while, someone will get caught in a downsizing or without a job for a while. Knowing that some small cushion existed allowed those with fairly minimal capital to take the kinds of risks implicit in what you're talking about. The meme which Tyler Durden and John Young--not surprising to me that both are Manhattanites, representing the East Coast view of capitalism--are popularizing is the one that says that what made companies successful was *government spending*, not this compact which needed little or no government role, and that this makes government intervention in business justifiable. Even more mendacious is the claim that those who worked hard and risked their capital by investing in companies are profiting at the expense of the less privileged. Well. I wasn't exactly trying to say that. At least, Intel was successful because the government gave it tax breaks..that's what I'm NOT saying. However, add my point above to the notion that the whole American social fabric probably can not be separated into small discete chunks, and you get my point. Or at least, the logic that compels one to conclude that the murder of 40 million African Americans is justifiable should somehow make one take those notions with a grain of salt. Intel or National Semiconductor doesn't and never did exist in a vacuum. They were started by great engineers and physicsts that were educated in places like Stanford, or that worked in Bell Labs. And this isn't an argument for tax-and-spend 'statism' per se, but simply that there's a social/political/economic environment that can't be diced and sliced. You'd dice and slice an African American population, but then again it's from these inner cities that much of popular American culture has arisen (ie, between pro sports, various forms of music and so on...). Who knows the impact these people have had in terms of providing 'content' for the chips and TV screens and so on. Am I therefore arguing that this justifies US tax policies? Hell no. I might bother trying if I thought $$$-towards-blacks amounted to anything more than mere mollification and storage. (Hell, my household probably pays more than the whole rest of the Cypherpunks list in annual taxes...including May, I'd bet.) No, blacks aren't the enemy. I'm not even convinced that the basic notion of the state is the enemy. But those who currently adminster the state and utilize it for various ends have morphed themselves, and (most likely) the American State into the defacto enemy that billions of people throughout the world are starting to resent. For that reason I'd like to cut out the cancer that eats my hard-earned resources and utlizes them to benefit a preselected few. -TD PS: Is there any comment that Mr May would like to profer on the issue of having been rejected by some hot black tail back in the day? (ie, aside from I'd like to see you are your infant children stripped of epidermis and dipped in seasalt) From: Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 12:06:29 -0800 On Dec 31, 2003, at 10:51 AM, Tim May wrote: Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life (from his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires and landmines and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or physical needs. So this system has served him pretty well, insofar as there was a place for him to apply his skills in order to make his $$$. That system was payed for by somebody else's taxes, and now it's asking (well, demanding from) him for some $$$ that he apparently can easily afford. Nonsense. The chip companies were NOT payed for by somebody else's taxes. (Nor was the invention of the IC or the microprocessor paid for by DARPA or anyone else in government, despite factually incorrect lore to the contrary. I was there, at least for the onset of the micro, and I can say precisely what role government contracts played: none.) Engineers and scientists who work an estimated 8 months out of each year to pay their taxes (Federal plus state plus local plus payroll plus property plus sales plus.) see the minority layabouts working not one _day_ for their entitlements and benefits and social services. I'm going to elaborate on this point, as there seems to be a growing meme in the tech culture (especially amongst the anti-free trade, twentysomething, self-described geeks) that somehow government built or paid for technology
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
What's pleasurable about reading the fiction of ideologues like Tim is the smack-down tone of their prejudices. Fake, fake, fake. Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and wealthy individuals like himself, especially those associated with the greeders of the defense industry, rather the national security state. No US institution has been uncontaminated by the wealth generated by the illusion of US enemies and the raping of the economy to simulate battle with such fictional threats, at home and abroad. Welfare is puny by comparison, and Tim's castigation of it is like the master of the house bitching about health needs of his servants while requiring them to wipe his ass. Standard nouveau riche conceit which reveals a fear of again being a poor asswipe himself, the stench of self-loathing inescapable. The favorite mindlessness of the ideologue, is to rehash endlessly comfortable old prejudices, chanting repetitively the same accusations, avoiding self-criticism in the manner of the self-righteous, professing of certainty to conceal doubt, working hard to present an image of confidence, most often by blaming and attacking easy targets. The rich fear the poor, and rightly so, for they know who pays for their perks. And the answer to this fear is always threats of violence, the dominant paradigm of those who reap the most benefits from house rules of the United States. Cloaked, as ever, in blind faith in the Constitution, or another rigged fat cat document used to fleece the peasants at home and abroad, based as they always are on justification of the supremacy of the over-privileged. Eveready to shoot those who disagree, send them up the chimneys, the teenie-bopper ideologue struts mightily against imaginary demons. Wasn't it a leftist who coined Goldwater's most memorable phrase? Extremists are all alike, full of shit and hatred, their own worst enemy. Suicide prone, but afraid to go alone.
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
In a message dated 12/31/2003 4:44:34 AM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and wealthy individuals like himself Government favoritism? It sounds like you don't believe a raising tide lifts all ships. Tim is entitled to keep the wealth he has earned, when it's taken its called stealing. The rich fear the poor, and rightly so, for they know who pays for their perks. What commie nonsense. Wasn't it a leftist who coined Goldwater's most memorable phrase? The libertarian Karl Hess wrote most of Goldwater's speeches, but the quote you mention was one popularized by Ben Franklin who in turn was using an unattributed Latin quote. Regards, Matt Gaylor-
Vengeance Libertarianism
On Dec 30, 2003, at 10:01 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (This space reserved for former Marxist and now neocon standard-bearer James Donald to foam that I am a Saddam lover and a supporter of Chomsky.) I will say that I was a a former marxist. This is not to bow at the feet of some better method, nor to trivialize the past. My awakening, as it were, actually happened here, for better or worse. Tim, Hal, Lucky, Uni and to some extent Detweiler all helped form my view. More than a few others. This was back in '93, mostly. At least, the founding, for me was then. I know some things happened later (I saw Uni present his Coke Presentation in 2002 for the first time), and I became concerned with business, or at least companies that wanted cash, and to be a business later. I never went through a Marxist phase, never even came close. This despite entering college in 1970, this despite going to a school where the dominant paradigm was leftist (UC Santa Barbara). I occasionally wonder what my perspective might be had I ever held leftist, collectivist thoughts. Oh well, I'll never know. Thirty years ago I _was_ more charitable about the various groups which claim to have been aggrieved, and I dutifully referred to negroes as blacks, argued earnestly with doubting leftists about the importance of the profit motive, cited semi-leftists who had reasonable things to say about capitalism and liberty and the Constitution. But over the years, as I have seen a huge chunk of money taken from me at gunpoint and given to welfare skanks, inner city negro mutants, gay activist buttfucker San Francisco queer groups, foreign nations with dictators like Hussein (both of them), Mubarek, Amin, Meir, Rabin, and a hundred others, and as education has declined while the pigeons demand more handouts...I have become what I call a vengeance libertarian. While certain theoreticians of 30 years argued for silly ideas about how how it is immoral to land on another's balcony while falling from a building, because the property rights had not been negotiated, and thus argued that even self-defense is fraught with moral problems, another camp of us were developing the idea that vengeance is good, that crypto anarchy will not only let some of us withdraw from the system, a la Galt's Gulch, but also it will let us execute justice on those who stole from us. For every negro welfare momma who took money for the past number of years, tell her to pay it all back, with compounded interest, or face time in a labor camp to repay what she stole. And if she cannot, or will not, which is ovewhelmingly likely, harvest her organs (if any takers can be found) and send the leftovers up the smokestacks. Ditto for the queers who have collected public health funds to pay for their sodomy. (I have no issue with their choices of partners, except that the diseases they contract via their habits, and their inability to work, is their problem, not mine. And not any corporations, except by the choice of that corporation.) Vengeance libertarianism is the rational kind. It will result in 20-40 million of the leeches, the bums, the minority grifters, the so-called aggrieved, the winos, the addicts, all being sent up the chimneys. Hitler had only minor reasons to go after the Jews (many of them had manipulated the economy to favor Jews while also preaching a no defense loser strategy to their untermenschen), we have much more reason to go after the tens of millions of underpeople who have been using their thugs in government to steal from us. We have much more justification today to liquidate the parsites than Hitler ever had. As for government, I estimate that 99% of those in Congress and government agencies in the past 40 years have earned killing. Of current Congressvarmints, only two seem to be not guilty. Of low-level employees, a bunch are just willing dweebs, and may be able to work off their debts in a labor camp for a decade or two. But probably the cleaner solution is just to do a thermonuclear cauterization of the region surrounding Washington and start fresh from there with a very limited government that honors the Constitution instead of catering to negroes and queers and welfare addicts. Crypto anarchy will make delivering justice to tens of millions a reality. The world will learn a lesson when we burn off these criminals. --Tim May Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.--Barry Goldwater
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks
On Dec 31, 2003, at 9:27 AM, Tyler Durden wrote: Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and wealthy individuals like himself, especially those associated with the greeders of the defense industry, rather the national security state. Yes...that's the thing I don't fully get. If we assume that Mr May made a big chunk of $$$ at Intel, isn't it rather naive of him to assume that the same system that helped make Intel the global $$$-generator it is isn't the same system that keeps black folks quiescent and so on? I think it's doubtful that Intel could have become what it is in any other country in the world. What's this nonsense about keeping black folks quiescent and so on/ I saw minorities practically float under the Golden Gate Bridge in inner tubes, coming from Vietnam. A few years after arriving, they were opening small shops and restaurants, then leading the way to opening screwdriver shops for building white box PCs. As with most past minorities--Irish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, etc.--they buckled down and worked their butts off, often living 5-10 to an apartment, saving for the day when they could buy their own house. Huge parts of Sunnyvale and Cupertino, to name just a few of the communities where this happened, became largely Asian during the 1980s. Meanwhile, the black folk kept listening to Rev. Jess Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton tell them that they were owed reparations, that they were owed a series of entitlements. No suprise that a large fraction of negro teens subscribe to the view that reading be for whitey. In fact, negroes have invented a whole series of insult terms for those who study too much, for those who break out of the field worker status: Uncle Toms, Oreos, etc. Imagine where the Asians would be if Asian kids who did well in science and math were taunted as race traitors? Today, Intel's engineering staff is about 75% minority, mostly Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Pakistanis, and assorted other minorities. More than half of all entering students at Berkeley, in all majors summed together, are Asian. At Intel, we had very, very, very few blacks apply for engineering jobs. I recall three of them, and one of them was from Sierra Leone, not the U.S. All three left after various problems of their own making. When I was interviewing candidates for engineering, I interviewed a bunch of Asians, about the same number of whites, and no negroes. Not by my choice, but because the negroes had largely ghettoized themselves into Black Studies, Sociology, and Yoruba/East African languages, or had not made it to graduation. There are no negroes in senior high tech positions at any of the companies I am in investor in for some very obvious reasons. Math be for whitey. Reading be for whitey. We be owed repa-ations for diskiminashun!! Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life (from his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires and landmines and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or physical needs. So this system has served him pretty well, insofar as there was a place for him to apply his skills in order to make his $$$. That system was payed for by somebody else's taxes, and now it's asking (well, demanding from) him for some $$$ that he apparently can easily afford. Nonsense. The chip companies were NOT payed for by somebody else's taxes. (Nor was the invention of the IC or the microprocessor paid for by DARPA or anyone else in government, despite factually incorrect lore to the contrary. I was there, at least for the onset of the micro, and I can say precisely what role government contracts played: none.) Engineers and scientists who work an estimated 8 months out of each year to pay their taxes (Federal plus state plus local plus payroll plus property plus sales plus.) see the minority layabouts working not one _day_ for their entitlements and benefits and social services. Do the math, unless you think math be for whitey. Therefore, any thought system that has as a corrollary ...and 40 million negros should die... should immediately be suspect of having been based on a foundation of non-mathematical muck, likely relating to penis envy and getting rejected by some hot black chick Mr May tried to date back in 1957 or whatever. You are contemptible. --Tim May
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks
On Dec 31, 2003, at 10:51 AM, Tim May wrote: Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life (from his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires and landmines and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or physical needs. So this system has served him pretty well, insofar as there was a place for him to apply his skills in order to make his $$$. That system was payed for by somebody else's taxes, and now it's asking (well, demanding from) him for some $$$ that he apparently can easily afford. Nonsense. The chip companies were NOT payed for by somebody else's taxes. (Nor was the invention of the IC or the microprocessor paid for by DARPA or anyone else in government, despite factually incorrect lore to the contrary. I was there, at least for the onset of the micro, and I can say precisely what role government contracts played: none.) Engineers and scientists who work an estimated 8 months out of each year to pay their taxes (Federal plus state plus local plus payroll plus property plus sales plus.) see the minority layabouts working not one _day_ for their entitlements and benefits and social services. I'm going to elaborate on this point, as there seems to be a growing meme in the tech culture (especially amongst the anti-free trade, twentysomething, self-described geeks) that somehow government built or paid for technology, business, high tech, etc. What built our system was essentially a _compact_, an agreement codified in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and even centuries of common law that a bunch of things would happen: -- that interference in the business choices of a business would be minimal -- that failing businesses would not be bailed out (and, indeed, none of the leading companies in 1850 last much beyond 1900, few in business in 1900 are still dominant, etc.) -- that owners, employers, etc. and their employees, customers, etc. would themselves negotiate wages, prices, benefits, etc., without a top-down order about who might be employed, at what rates, etc. (This of course began to change when the socialists assumed power in the 1930s, and then dramatically changed when the Great Society socialists assumed power in 1961. It then came to be seen as the role of government to set wages, to force businesses to deal with those they wished not to, to let debtors off without repaying debts or even having their kneecaps smashed, etc. This was the start of the Era of Entitlements, when some ethnic groups decided that reading be for whitey and that they would coast on freebies paid for by the suckas still working.) This compact, based essentially on voluntary interaction in trade, employment, and investment, worked quite well for many decades. This compact, this way of doing things which is usually called liberty or laissez faire, was not built by government...until relatively recent times the size of government was small and tax rates for most workers and investors were low. What made the system work was that the system largely worked on the non-initiation of force principle, which is what begets voluntary transactions. If a person thought he was not being paid enough, it was his option to go elsewhere, to start his own business, etc. If a business wanted to raise or lower prices, their option. Customers were free to purchase or not. The meme which Tyler Durden and John Young--not surprising to me that both are Manhattanites, representing the East Coast view of capitalism--are popularizing is the one that says that what made companies successful was *government spending*, not this compact which needed little or no government role, and that this makes government intervention in business justifiable. Even more mendacious is the claim that those who worked hard and risked their capital by investing in companies are profiting at the expense of the less privileged. You are successful because of the taxes paid by the less-privileged, so now it is right that you be taxed at high rates so that welfare benefits can be maintained. is the essential message here. This is hokum. Very few U.S. or even European and Asian businesses were built with public funds. Neither Sony nor Honda, two examples of post-war successes, were built by MITI (MITI, in fact, frequently criticized Sony and Honda for the courses they pursued...meanwhile MITI was funding the now-defunct TRON microprocessor and the Fifth Generation Computer, utterly missing out on workstations, PCs, modern microprocessors, CAD, routers, and the Internet). None of Intel's achievements, whether the first dynamic RAM (the 1101), the first EPROM, the first microprocessor, the first single board computer, the first, etc., was paid for by any kind of DARPA or DOD or government grant. In fact, the military was pissed off at us for not developing their kind of mil-spec components, for not bidding on military contracts. We made our
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 01:59:50PM -0500, Sunder wrote: If those are your beliefs, then by all means, set the first example, and go kill yourself. Better yet, sacrifice yourself to your goddess... By doing so, you'll also earn yourself a Darwin Award... unless you've already fathered kids... But from your tone of voice, I'd say you've probably castrated yourself years ago. No, I have offspring. But what makes you think I'm human? -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
-- On 31 Dec 2003 at 12:45, Tim May wrote: People like Tyler Durden, James Donald, and John Young are using the tired old cliches about how it is society that paid for business and hence society has some right to take a cut of each transaction between Alice and Bob. The proposition that I am saying such things is considerably sillier than the proposition that you are saying such things. you have left out your reasoning as to how I am supposedly saying such things. Perhaps your logic is James Donald says that rulers have no right to sovereignty, thus it is OK to whack Saddam, thus it is OK to tax and conscript to whack Saddam ? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG ldyLHi1NpqKPMhX9XAgAYoGo4H6JIR+Ha6goGIdN 4MjfF7Xt9wIsNTh9Ttnln47I3YfYOfw8RMzuH0+sT
Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 03:48:21PM -0500, Sunder wrote: No, I have offspring. But what makes you think I'm human? Ok, so, you're not human, you're a lunatic. Well, with an emphasis on the luna ... Howl at the moon much lately? As a matter of fact, yes. Good for the soul, and what ails ye. Also often a fairly sociable event, at least among my volken. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
